Airbnb’s Hollywood and Vines campaign

Airbnb, a service that allows users to advertise and find places to stay in 192 countries, have been conducting a campaign to crowd source a video about travelling. Hollywood and Vines encourages fans to submit Vine videos to the @Airbnb handle using the #AirbnbHV hashtag. The handle tweets the different shots they need, including childlike sketches and their numbers, throughout the day and fans have 48 hours to submit six-second clips of their interpretations. When posting their Vines entrants include a hashtag with the shot number. Entries are judged by originality & creativity, Vine quality & clarity and compliance with director’s instructions.

The microsite is very simplistic and could have been more attractive in order to demonstrate the creative side of the campaign, especially considering the attractiveness of the website in comparison.

The brand have took a different approach to crowdsourcing a video – most campaigns give fans a brief and let them interpret it as they wish. Lexus recently did something like this with Instagram for an advert for their 2014 Lexus IS. They invited 200 Instagram users to an event, let them shoot the car however they wanted and combined them all to make the #LexusInstafilm. Airbnb’s approach seems quite haphazard because entries could be easily missed if a user misses one of the hashtags, or a shot could receive no entries, especially considering the brand aimed to gather all the entries over 4 days. It will be interesting to see the result, the brand asked for a lot of different shots and all of the Vines submitted and featured on the microsite seem to vary a lot in terms of style.